{talib} is an R package for Technical Analysis (TA) and interactive financial charts. The package is a wrapper of TA-Lib and supports over 200 indicators, including candlestick patterns.
Basic usage
In this section I will show how to calculate and chart different
indicators using Bitcoin (BTC). BTC is a built-in
data.frame using the {cryptoQuotes}-package
and has the following form:
str(
talib::BTC
)
#> 'data.frame': 366 obs. of 5 variables:
#> $ open : num 42274 44185 44966 42863 44191 ...
#> $ high : num 44200 45918 45521 44799 44392 ...
#> $ low : num 42181 44152 40555 42651 42362 ...
#> $ close : num 44185 44966 42863 44191 44179 ...
#> $ volume: num 831 2076 2225 1791 2483 ...The focus of this section will be Bollinger Bands and Harami patterns. All remaining indicators and candlestick patterns behaves in the same manner.
NOTE: All functions expects that a permutation of either
open,high,low,closeand/orvolumeexists (case sensitive). But this depends on the specific functions; for indicators that only useshighandlow, the remaining columns needs not to be present in the data. Column names must follow OHLC-V conventions unless remapped via thecols-argument.
Indicators
All indicator functions in {talib} assumes that the
input argument x is an OHLC-V object coercible to
data.frame; the BTC can passed directly into
the function:
{
cat("Bollinger Bands")
tail(
talib::bollinger_bands(
x = talib::BTC
)
)
}
#> Bollinger Bands
#> upper middle lower
#> 2024-12-26 01:00:00 104478.35 98217.88 91957.42
#> 2024-12-27 01:00:00 100877.73 97020.16 93162.59
#> 2024-12-28 01:00:00 99886.22 96516.01 93145.81
#> 2024-12-29 01:00:00 99871.12 96134.41 92397.71
#> 2024-12-30 01:00:00 99713.92 95620.42 91526.92
#> 2024-12-31 01:00:00 99373.89 95236.42 91098.95Internally, bollinger_bands() calls
model.frame with a prespecified formula
corresponding to the default calculation method of the indicator. You
can modify this by passing a different variable through the
cols-argument as follows:
{
cat("Bollinger Bands")
tail(
talib::bollinger_bands(
x = talib::BTC,
cols = ~high
)
)
}
#> Bollinger Bands
#> upper middle lower
#> 2024-12-26 01:00:00 108202.2 100799.26 93396.27
#> 2024-12-27 01:00:00 105337.0 99701.75 94066.50
#> 2024-12-28 01:00:00 102506.4 98606.20 94705.95
#> 2024-12-29 01:00:00 101126.9 97847.80 94568.70
#> 2024-12-30 01:00:00 101232.6 97525.44 93818.30
#> 2024-12-31 01:00:00 100720.8 97187.48 93654.11The Harami pattern, and all candlestick patterns in general, returns
a matrix of <integers>: -1 for bearish patterns, 1
for bullish pattern and 0 for no pattern. See below:
{
cat("Harami Patterns")
tail(
talib::harami(
talib::BTC
)
)
}
#> Harami Patterns
#> CDLHARAMI
#> 2024-12-26 01:00:00 0
#> 2024-12-27 01:00:00 0
#> 2024-12-28 01:00:00 0
#> 2024-12-29 01:00:00 0
#> 2024-12-30 01:00:00 0
#> 2024-12-31 01:00:00 0The pattern is rare, so let us find occurrences instead:
## locate bullish Harami
## patterns
{
cat("Bullish Harami")
talib::BTC[
which(x == 1),
]
}
#> Bullish Harami
#> open high low close volume
#> 2024-01-13 01:00:00 42770.74 43244.75 42417.54 42842.43 1389.8450
#> 2024-01-19 01:00:00 41286.00 42144.29 40250.00 41622.00 2204.1180
#> 2024-01-23 01:00:00 39521.03 40135.90 38508.01 39871.07 1691.9766
#> 2024-03-06 01:00:00 63803.50 67655.97 62834.01 66112.32 2152.6899
#> 2024-04-03 02:00:00 65477.34 66944.00 64500.00 65986.02 730.2592
#> 2024-04-16 02:00:00 63449.24 64392.44 61641.34 63820.00 975.8047
#> 2024-05-02 02:00:00 58267.89 59638.02 56893.92 59066.67 1608.7340
#> 2024-06-27 02:00:00 60828.18 62346.00 60559.38 61629.99 1343.3199
#> 2024-12-20 01:00:00 97385.63 98138.88 92129.00 97767.96 6001.8659
## locate bearish Harami
## patterns
{
cat("Bearish Harami")
talib::BTC[
which(x == -1),
]
}
#> Bearish Harami
#> open high low close volume
#> 2024-02-29 01:00:00 62501.89 63687.68 60288.00 61176.09 1673.0354
#> 2024-03-18 01:00:00 68343.73 68916.00 66500.00 67607.98 982.5063
#> 2024-03-21 01:00:00 67843.99 68251.55 64500.00 65485.53 1852.2649
#> 2024-04-23 02:00:00 66836.51 67215.98 65824.00 66420.00 642.0294
#> 2024-08-07 02:00:00 56047.14 57757.99 54576.39 55147.74 3693.4807
#> 2024-08-09 02:00:00 61705.24 61763.99 59562.44 60866.00 3009.3530
#> 2024-09-14 02:00:00 60541.13 60668.00 59417.53 60011.32 1862.7975
#> 2024-10-30 01:00:00 72724.97 72950.00 71400.01 72329.01 2844.8865
#> 2024-11-28 01:00:00 95957.53 96667.16 94658.27 95663.18 2634.8156
#> 2024-12-05 01:00:00 98740.11 104149.99 91500.00 97050.01 13774.3383Charting indicators
In this section I will focus on the basics of charting. The charting uses {plotly} internally which also enables manual drawing of support and resistance lines.
Information: Please refer to
vignette(topic = "charting", package = "talib")for a more detailed description of the charting.
The charting functionality mimicks the behaviour of
plot() and lines() where each is called
separately. There are two main charting functions in {talib}:
chart() and indicator(). Below I will expand
the analysis by adding Moving Average Convergence/Divergence indicators
to the chart:
{
## main candlestick
## chart
talib::chart(
talib::BTC
)
## add bollinger bands
## to the chart
talib::indicator(
talib::bollinger_bands
)
## add identified harami
## patterns
talib::indicator(
talib::harami
)
## add moving average
## convergence/divergence
## to the chart
talib::indicator(
talib::moving_average_convergence_divergence
)
}
#> Warning: Ignoring 33 observationsOne thing to note here is that indicator() internally
calls the {plotly}-methods for each
indicator which determines whether the indicator is main-chart indicator
or sub-chart indicator.
Contributing and bug reports
The underlying library, TA-Lib, is a long-standing and well-known library but this R wrapper is still in its early stage. All contributions, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome.